Cain and Abel review: From obscurely haunting to surreally silly

Jason Blake

A scene from The Rabble's Cain and Abel at Belvoir Downstairs. Photo: Brett Boardman

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Belvoir Downstairs, May 17

We haven’t seen much of Melbourne theatremakers The Rabble in Sydney. What we have witnessed to date – wildly unpredictable deconstructions of Salome and Lorca’s The House of Bernardo Alba – has been fascinating and frustrating.

The Rabble’s latest work, Cain and Abel, devised by Emma Valente and Kate Davis, is less the former, more the latter.

The biblical figure of Cain, the sibling murderer condemned to be “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth” in Genesis 4:14, stalks our culture. He lurks in the shadows in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He inspires John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Peter Paul Rubens, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan have all pondered his pivotal act of violence.

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Davis and Valente cast all these masculine musings aside by asking us to imagine a simple alternative: What if Cain and Abel were sisters?

They conjure Cain and Abel (Dana Miltins and Mary Helen Sassman) in a transparent prism (a deliberately difficult space to occupy and accommodate in this small theatre) filled with milky mist. The action, wordless at first and sparely scripted thereafter, is similarly foggy. Offerings are made. A sacrifice is enacted. There’s a strong sense of ritual.

That silent prayer of the theatergoer pops into your head: please, don’t let this be all there is.

As if in answer, a more sharply focused scene evolves. A cowering Abel bears a massive bruise. “I walked into a door,” she says. Cain rejects her excuse. Try again. “I tripped up the stairs.” Try again. Abel’s explanations become more convoluted and desperate. Cain tapes a lump of raw meat to Abel’s battered face. It is humour of the grimmest kind, though when Cain stubs her cigarette out in Abel’s eye, all smiles are erased.

Of the five scenes that make up this 60-minute exercise, it’s the one that commands attention. Little else in this piece – which veers from obscurely haunting, to grotesque, to surreally silly – grips to the same extent. Blood and floods of water lead to consideration of the theatre’s plumbing arrangements rather than Davis and Valente’s efforts to deconstruct and re-imagine age-old images of gender, violence and victimhood.